Appian Product and Customer Support Announcement

Appian Forum members, please join us on December 9th at Noon EST to review the latest features of Appian 6 and updates to the Appian Forum customer support site.

This version of Appian first represents a continuation of Appian’s commitment to deliver a highly scalable and responsive process development environment based on the latest industry standards. In addition, we have initiated our first release of the Appian Tempo project, bringing an entirely new perspective on process participation.

New in this release, Appian has updated the security architecture allowing easy adoption of modern authentication frameworks. Appian customers can now quickly integrate with their enterprise LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos and other custom authentication servers. More exciting though, is the ability for our customers to use modern authentication techniques like OAuth. OAuth integration can enable Appian customers to quickly integrate with common cloud providers and consumer social networks like Salesforce.com, Facebook and Twitter, allowing any user of these environments to authenticate with Appian and participate in process events. This greatly expands the potential for direct consumer process participation in a organization’s key processes and allows for a more intimate interaction between a company and their customers.

Next, we have overhauled our real-time analytics engine to greatly increase the performance and scalability of report performance. Appian has always differentiated in the BPM industry by being the only vendor to include a native in-memory reporting engine. This has allowed Appian to deliver unmatched reporting performance with real-time results with very low maintenance. Now, the number of possible parallel analytics engines has now been expanded to 16, to accommodate truly massive amounts of data for customers needing real-time reports against tens-of-millions of active process instances.

In addition, Appian is continuing to innovate around the merging of MDM and BPM concepts. This has become a hot topic recently with Forrester publishing a great whitepaper called “Avoid Process Data Headaches: Align Business Process And Data Governance Initiatives”. As customers build more complex process environments, being able to easily connect and govern the data that drives those processes has become increasingly important. In response, Appian has introduced a new Data Store and Data Designer environment that delivers an easy way for data owners to share and represent data sources in Appian and empower process modelers to work with existing data. This architecture is highly scalable and uses SOA concepts to represent data objects as re-usable components throughout the BPM platform.

Finally, Appian has released Appian Tempo to select customers to begin experiencing BPM in an entirely new way. Appian Tempo will revolutionize the way people participate in process. It’s an entirely different view on process participation which will break down departmental and geographic barriers and connect people in ways that couldn’t be modeled into a traditional BPM process. For now, we’ll save the details for a early next year, when we’ll be organizing a larger launch event.